A little video of the tortoises mating away. Blame the bad quality on Mihai's dad's digital camera ... unfortunately no sound - .wmv - 25 s. - 326 kB.

(As usual, move your mouse over the pictures for descriptions & click them for bigger versions.)

Since Mihai was going to live in Sweden for the next 1,5 years, he couldn't keep his tortoises. They had been living quite well in his garden so far, and they might have continued to do so while Mihai was away, had it not been for the new threat they were facing in the form of Picki. Picki is a fox terrier and former street dog who can't help but kill anything that moves. He had to kill animals and eat them before in order to survive, so it would seem hard to make him break the habit. Without Mihai there, even harder ...

So, Mihai decided to set the tortoises out into the wild. They had been surviving pretty much on their own in the garden, hibernating without problem in the ground, and they had even received some basic training in coping with ferocious predators, so it shouldn't be any too hard change of conditions for them.

The two tortoises (lovingly nicknamed "die Stahlhelme") are of the species testudo graeca ibera ('Spur-thighed tortoise'), native to the round hills of Dobrogea in north-east Romania, not too far from the Danube delta. As a colleague of Mihai in the Ministry of Environment was going to Tulcea one weekend, Mihai finally got his ass off the wagon, and we packed ourselves, the tortoises and the colleague into Mihai's dad's car and drove off.

... But not so fast. We almost thought we weren't going to make it, because we had to *find* the tortoises first.

The male was, as usual, relatively easy to locate, but the female seemed to be almost too clever for her own good. All tortoises are very apt at hiding themselves, especially the females. We spent about 45 minutes in the pretty small garden looking for her - Mihai tearing up all the vegetation in desperation, and I combing through each and every millimeter systematically. My method proved to be more successful, as I eventually did discover the female in a place that Mihai had already searched through two or three times.

So, we packed them tightly in a cardboard box complete with breathing holes, and with a piece of styrofoam to separate them from each other, so they wouldn't fight. And off we went!

As we were closing in on our destination, driving on country roads scattered with small villages, endless sunflower fields and with horse-drawn carts in front of us every now and then, we suddenly spotted a tortoise by the roadside. It was a very big specimen, that was (unwisely) about to crawl over the road. Enthusiastic about the prospect of being able to help a *third* tortoise to a better life, Mihai stopped the car. Unfortunately, it takes a while before a car that drives in about 75 km/h stops. Thus, we couldn't do anything but watch as the big lorry behind us totally squashed the nice, big tortoise under its tyres.

We told ourselves that the lorry driver had probably simply not seen the tortoise, and damned our fates for not having gotten there just two minutes earlier ... These tortoises are an endangered species, and it is very rare indeed to spot them like that. The lorry driver surely was one unlucky sod for killing one of them.

Well, after we had dropped off Mihai's nice colleague in Tulcea, we went back a little bit, to the Macini hills. Mihai knew of some people who worked in a tortoise rehabilitation project somewhere in this region, but unfortunately he couldn't reach them on the phone. Instead, we asked a sunburned hunky farmer boy if there were any tortoises around the area, and where we might set out ours. 'Oh yes', he said, 'just put them here in the maize field, and they'll be fine!' Since the people in this region eat tortoises, we thanked him and went on to look for a way to get onto the hills where there were no humans around. 

Soon, we spotted a cow path up one hill, and went up that way - Mihai's dad's Dacia Supernova turned out to have unexpected cross-country capabilities. Halfway up we met a furry farmer who was cutting wood, and asked him for directions. Eventually, we drove to the top of the hill, and continued a bit along the ridge, away from the cow path, to get the tortoises as far away from humans as possible.

On each side of the ridge, the hill was covered by low forests. We took out the tortoises from the box, and carried them to the forest on the other side from the village, further away from our car, so they wouldn't come back and get under the tyres or something. 

Mihai placed them on the ground facing each other, so they would see that they were still together and be comforted by the other's presence. So they seemed to be, as it only took a minute or two before the male tortoise suddenly banged his carapace against the female's carapace. Mihai explained that this meant that they were going to mate.

As foreplay, the male repeatedly banged his carapace against the female's carapace and bit her in the feet, and the female started walking in front of him, so that he could more easily get on top of her. After a while they disappeared out of sight into the forest, and we could just hear the banging of the carapaces against each other. But a few minutes later, the sounds started to come back towards us again. Suddenly, a squeaking sound like a rubber duck rang out. Mihai had earlier imitated this sound, so I knew what it was: the male was squeaking as they were mating.

We went to watch and Mihai tried to film them, and after a lot of squeaking, they were done and crept apart, breathing heavily.

We were very happy about this. Hopefully, it meant that a couple of baby tortoises were going to hatch in a while. Maybe one of them would one day grow up to be as nice and big as the one that met its end earlier that day under the lorry's tyre ...?

After eating dinner and putting up the tent we went for a walk. Night was falling, and Mihai froze and listened intently at every strange sound, knowing that there were definitely wild boars around here (the woods were full of their paths), and maybe other big wild creatures. However, we didn't meet anyone ... save for a stone that Mihai stumbled across, that hissed angrily. It was *another* local tortoise, also a male, and pretty small. (Probably there were lots of females around, as well, only they, just like Mihai's female, were much more concerned with hiding themselves well than the males.)

As we were falling asleep in the tent, we suddenly started to hear grunts and squeals from the forest, not far from the tent. Wild boars! We listened to them anxiously, hoping that they wouldn't come to wreck our tent and fight us. Through my pet pig Sergei I am quite familiar with pigspeak, and from the sounds they made I could understand that they had noticed that there was something weird there - the car and the tent - but they were not extremely worked up, and most of them were grunting rather peacefully and reassuring the more nervous pigs. 

They passed without making any trouble, and when they were gone, Mihai ran to the car to get his lighter and an empty bottle (that you could squeeze and crumple up to make loud noises) - just in case. I tried to joke and said that in case of emergency, I could always try to communicate with them, but Mihai was too frightened to think it was funny ... He had heard too many stories about wild pigs tearing down tents and creating mayhem on campsites, as well as stories of them killing or almost killing hunters (in self-defense, of course). But since there were so few humans around these hills, maybe the boars hadn't had to learn to hate humans all that much?

Well, the next day we went to explore the surroundings further. The climate and vegetation were rather Mediterranean, and according to Mihai quite unique in Romania. The forests were low and dry, with plenty of orchids growing in the shade, and on the hilltops there was grass and various thorny bushes, along with many other interesting plants, such as house-leek, which was in bloom right then. 

There were also many interesting insects. We found the exoskeleton of a giant cicada-like creature, about 7-8 cm long without the 'tail'. Later on, in the forest, we heard loud rustling from a bush. When we looked closer, it turned out to be a living specimen of the same species as the exoskeleton. Mihai tried to catch it, but it was too strong and fast, and pulled itself loose of his grip and ran away. 

There were hundreds of big spiders sitting in their funnel-shaped, tightly woven nets. We found an old, half dead tree that had become a virtual spider tenement.

Save for the small village in the valley, there were absolutely no humans around. On the hills where we let loose the tortoises the only traces of human existence we could find were a couple of old pieces of glass, well polished by rain and time, and the rusty skeleton of a very old tin can. On another hill, next to the cow path, we found a plastic bag, and along the cow path a plastic bottle (we took both of them with us to throw away in the trash properly ...), but that was all.

In the afternoon we unfortunately had to get going back to Bucharest again. Down the bouncy hill we drove, praying that no little creatures would happen to get under the wheels ...

In the village we filled our water bottles in a public well. There were little animals in the water, but once you removed them, the water was delicious. When we got back in the car, it didn't want to start at first, being exhausted from all the mountaineering. But after a brief moment, it started, after all. You can always trust a Dacia!

Instead of driving back on the same old highways that we came on, we took another route through the villages. In one of them we stopped to pick up two guys who were hitchhiking to the neighbouring village. Mihai talked about tortoises with them, and tried to convince them that they didn't have to eat tortoises, even though it is delicious ... We dropped off the younger man first, and then the grandpa confided us that he was going over to his neighbour's house tonight, as he was expecting a phone call from his children, and didn't have a phone of his own. All his children were living in Spain nowadays. 

Then, the grandpa told us which roads we should take to get back towards the southwest on, and which had the best surface. Well, after driving a while on the 'good' road, we started to wonder about what the 'bad' road he had warned us about was like, because there were enormous holes in the tar that came rather irregularly but frequently. "Sarajevo!", exclaimed Mihai as he failed to evade yet another pot hole. 

The car dived through yet another huge flock of birds that were flying low over the road, and after passing a few more villages with poultry running around and cows and horses grazing by the roadside, where the police office was nothing but a deserted mud cake hut with no roof, we eventually came out on the highway again. 

We brought some maize and eggplants from peasants by the roadside, and all too soon we were back in Bucharest again. "Why does such a lovely maiden have such an ugly head?", mused Mihai as we halted at a congested traffic light. 

But then, he was perhaps a bit too harsh on the maiden, as Bucharest is actually a very nice city. You don't necessarily notice that if you just drive around on the big streets by car, but there are lots of shady, narrow streets, with charmingly dilapidated little houses ...

o______oOo_ Text by Tinet Elmgren, pictures by Tinet Elmgren and Mihai Tomescu _oOo_____oo

o Lake Jackson is a lake in northwestern Florida. US Highway 27 is a four-lane highway that was built directly across a 3/4-mile portion of this lake, isolating part of it. The highway is a virtually impassable barrier to turtles and other wildlife, with 21,500 vehicles traveling along it each day.